Dwayne Killian has given lots of tickets in his seven years as a police officer in Joliet. Last year, though, people began to react differently when he wrote them up. “Like one guy,” he recalls. “He says, ‘Do whatever you gotta do–just don’t tell nobody you gave me a ticket while you were on a bicycle.’”
Joliet may be more open to changes like this thanks to a program the city instituted more than two years ago: community policing. The term means different things to different people, but most would agree that the motive behind it is to get police officers more involved with the day-to-day problems of the people they serve.
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Joliet decided on community policing, says Chief Beazley, when traditional methods failed to curb growing crime. He says, “It’s something you’re going to find in any city.” Although Joliet is only a city of 70,000, police there say that Joliet’s crime mirrors that of larger places. “Its demographics, its incidents, its gangs,” says one official, “are almost identical to police districts in Chicago.”
“They wanted us to get out of the squad car and talk to people,” says Killian. “But a lot of the area is parking lots, and we’d spend a lot of time walking and not really doing anything–so I came up with the idea of bikes.”
Killian says that bikes also help cops cover more ground and make it easier to catch wrongdoers. Joliet business owners, for example, frequently complained about unruly late-night gatherings in their parking lots. The offending youths could easily spot approaching squad cars and bolt before police got there. “Now, with these bikes, we go in without them noticing,” Killian says. “We’ll stand there talking to ’em until they say ‘Wait a minute–you guys are cops?’ They’re, like, shocked.”
“He made sure that publicity got in the paper about how effective the bicycle patrol was,” says Kaminska, “and what kind of arrests were being made, that these were actually police officers trained to make traffic stops on a bicycle.
But older, more mature officers might take more readily to bicycling, says Killian’s partner Dave Saxon–who at age 42 has carried a badge for half of his life. “Most of us have the John Wayne syndrome when we start as police officers . . . very aggressive,” he says. “I think with the bicycling job, you have to be more laid-back.”
